Archive for the ChemSpider Website Category

In trying to make access to information more intuitive for the users of ChemSpider we continue to add visual cues regarding what information is associated with a particular record on the database. If you see a nice colored spectrum under the ChemSpider ID it indicates, guess what, the association of spectral data as described previously.

So, look out for the icon below and click on it to go and review the spectra. And, if the compound you are examining doesn’t have associated spectra and you do…upload them and share with everyone!

As you peruse through a set of result hits you might notice a new visual element showing up in the first column under the ChemSpider ID. These are described below.

1) The Patent Seal – this icon indicates that there are patent data available on that compound. These data are available from the links to the SureChem database as described previously. So, when you see the rosette shown below you know there is patent information available. Click on it and you will be taken to a segregated list of patents as shown in the second image below. Each patent ID links through to SureChem.

‘Twas the night before Tuesday and all through the house, ChemSpider was running then got hit with a louse.

An unfortunate outage last night for ChemSpider as it went down for about three hours. Despite our best efforts to track the issue to something we can control the logfiles suggest that it was actuaal a web server glitch. Our want is to have system redundancy for just such a situation but unfortunately that will require yet another investment in hardware and that is simply not feasible at this time due to “employment status” and insufficient availability of funds. Unlike the majority (or all) of the similar systems online providing this service ChemSpider is funded by the hosts and there are no grants, capital investors or rich uncles behind it! We are up to a grand sum of about $2.50 a day from Google Adsense so can buy a Starbucks coffee cup now…another $1 and we’ll be filling it.

Even with server redundancy we are still at the mercy of ISP outages and power outages so are presently in discussions to see if there is a separate facility where we can have redundancy and less chance of outages.

Meanwhile, if I have a rich uncle out there reading the blog and you’d like to help sponsor the site we are accepting help! If you want to donate a server to the cause we’ll take it.

A number of ChemSpider users have asked us to provide enhanced viewing of chemical structures and suggested that we use the JMol Open Source viewer. This is an excellent example of a piece of Open Source software that has continued to advance in capabilities year on year with dozens of websites now taking advantage of this excellent piece of software. The new capabilities are described in detail on the ChemSpider blog.